


sounds like something that i used to feel

by Brishen



Category: Avengers, Captain America, Marvel
Genre: All American Boy Steve(TM), Angst, Fluff, Irish Steve Rogers, Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Road Trip, feel good stuff, i'm soft for my boys lost in time okay, slow-burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-19 13:30:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14238333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brishen/pseuds/Brishen
Summary: "Steve couldn’t stand staying in DC after what happened at the Triskelion - he needed familiarity. Something to ground him after having everything he’d ever known, everything he’d ever fought for, be torn down around him.It left Steve lost.It left Bucky something to find."based on the song 'two ghosts' by harry styles





	1. same lips red, same eyes blue

Bucky remembers Steve’s eyes.

It’s not a lot, and yet - it is.

They’re driving, and the street lights cast watery orange beams on the road. Something with a deep bass and an English accent is playing on the radio. Steve tells Bucky he likes music with soul in it - “I can’t just go around listening to noise, Buck. It has to mean something.”

It has to mean something, right? That he remembered?

Blue-as-yonder, he’d thought one night, staring at the hotel ceiling as he had woken up from a fitful sleep. Blue like the sky in summer evening’s that makes your heart ache for something unnameable. These days, theres not a lot Bucky can name. But he’s trying.

They’re driving to Florida, Steve tells him. Bucky asks if that’s where people go to die. Steve’s mouth curves in a wry smile.

“Depends who you ask, Buck.”

They started yesterday from Steve’s hole-in-the-wall apartment in Brooklyn. Steve couldn’t stand staying in DC after what happened at the Triskelion - he needed familiarity. Something to ground him after having everything he’d ever known, everything he’d ever fought for, be torn down around him.

It left Steve lost.

It left Bucky something to find.

Bucky showed up at Steve’s door three months after he moved in. Bucky moved in a week later. The week after that, they’re on a road trip. Bucky still isn’t totally sure why.

See, the thing was, Bucky didn’t know what he wanted.

He had spent so long doing what other people wanted. Against his will. Spending a few days in a blur of gunfire and screaming and hyper-focused tension, before being led back to a dark warehouse or bank vault like a sheep to slaughter.

Steve had broken the trance. The fog from Bucky’s eyes had lifted. He’d dragged Steve out of that river.

Even after all that, though, Bucky still feels like a shell. A wisp of a person - something less than human. He could eat and talk and sleep but he couldn’t tell you about his favorite food or his favorite band or what side he slept better on.

He needed to know who he was again.

So he found Steve. And they were going to Florida.

Steve’s hands looked giant on the steering wheel. Bucky remembers slowly, like a television finding the right station through thick static - Steve’s tiny hands wrapping around the paper bag his Ma packed his lunch in for school. Bucky smiles softly. It feels like a good thing to remember.

“What was my Ma’s name?” Bucky asks. Steve always says Ma, even though Bucky’s initial instinct is ‘Mother’.

“Winnifred. Winny for short,” Steve replies, glancing at Bucky out of the corner of his eye. His hands tighten on the steering wheel.

“Best damn matzo ball soup in the neighborhood. Left you warm for hours after - good for a romp in the snow,” Steve continues. The creases around his eyes soften, his lips relaxing. Bucky feels the impulse to run his thumb over his skin. He contains it, and turns up the volume on the radio.

“I like this song,” he declares. It feels like thunder and fireworks in his chest. Steve’s birthday fireworks. It feels like he’s found another part of himself, and tucks the feeling inside against his heart, a mother protecting her child. It feels precious.

“Amy Winehouse?” Steve asks, looking at the radio and over at Bucky in surprise and something near fondness. Bucky nods, and goes to add the song to his music library on his phone.

They pass the sign announcing cheerily that they’ve arrived in Virginia. Apparently, Virginia is for lovers. Bucky isn’t sure how they came to that conclusion.

“Were we in love?” Bucky asks.

Steve’s jaw visibly tenses. Bucky wants to swallow his words immediately.

“I don’t know,” he murmurs, and keeps driving.

They drive through the mountains, through mist and blue hills and water streaking down the windows. Bucky likes to make the water droplets race each other. Steve tells him to take his feet off the dash, but Bucky puts them right back up after a couple minutes. He likes the tone of Steve’s voice when he knows Bucky is being ornery.

“Stop it, will ya? You’ll put me in an early grave,” Steve says around a mouthful of M&M’s, slapping Bucky’s shin.

“I think the candy will do that well enough,” Bucky says primly, settling his feet more firmly between the dashboard and windshield.

Steve offers him his middle finger, and Bucky almost laughs.

  
++

 

That night, Steve is the one who wakes up in a sweat. His brain can’t seem to figure out why his heart is beating so fast, but it sure isn’t happy about it.

He barely makes it to the bathroom to throw up. An familiar scream plays on loop in his mind. His knees shake on the too-white bathroom tile. He washes his mouth out with chlorine saturated tap water and returns to bed, laying on top of the covers.

“You okay?” Bucky says, his voice bouncing against the darkness like a train whistle, lonely and haunting. Alone and haunted is just about how Steve feels most of the time, these days.

“No,” Steve replies simply. He can feel Bucky wanting to ask more, to ask if he can help. Steve doesn’t know if he wants him to.

He used to feel so shameful watching Bucky’s mouth move as he talked, red and glistening like the cherry pies in the window of their old favorite diner, now a condemned building in the rougher part of Brooklyn. Bucky’s mouth used to curl around vowels like waves and bit consonants like apples, crisp and golden. These days Steve found himself staring unashamed when Bucky spoke. He felt the same tug in his stomach, but Bucky’s words lacked the same smirk, like everything coming out of his mouth was a double entendre or a charming quip. Bucky said his words mechanically, steel-grey and bolted down to his mouth.

Steve didn’t feel guilty turning down Bucky’s sympathy. His words still didn’t sound like they belonged to him. They sounded like a pre-recorded cassette tape someone forgot to finish. His heart ached for the day when they sounded like home again, like he could curl up in the comfort of Bucky's voice and stay there.

From across the dark ocean between their beds, Bucky hums softly, his voice cracking when he tries to go too high. Steve recognizes it immediately. Fred Astaire had never been Steve’s favorite, but Bucky loved him. When Steve had been little and sick too often for any person to handle, Bucky would lay in bed with him, combined body heat providing some comfort to Steve’s chill-wracked body. He’d hum and sometimes provide lyrics, chest vibrating comfortably against Steve’s back until he fell asleep.

It wasn’t the same as it had been, and Bucky mostly repeats the chorus of ‘they can’t take that away from me’, but Steve’s heart unclenches from its painful strain in his throat and slowly returns to its resting rhythm, his eyes closing as he envisioned Bucky’s mouth curling, rippling through words he had inherited from the wind.

In the morning, Bucky drinks his coffee white with four packets of sugar - exactly the way he used to. Despite his rough sleep, Steve is in a better mood than he had been. He drinks his coffee black like a true Irishman and plays his turn against Tony in Words With Friends. As usual, Tony is 100 points ahead of him. Bucky reads the newspaper and pulls apart his croissant flake by flake.

It’s comfortable. It feels normal. A tiny part of Steve still wants to scream with rage, punch, kick, bite - do anything to get Bucky to react more than half-smiles and furrowed brows when he tries to remember something. Steve is proud of Bucky’s progress so far, but he’s selfish. He always has been when it comes to Bucky.

“Do you remember the summer before you enlisted the first time, and you and me and Doug Meeker and Timmy Shields smoked weed on my fire escape, and that weapon of an old woman upstairs asked us if we had enough to share?”

Bucky looks at him, worry his bottom lip between his teeth. Steve almost tells him never mind when Bucky replies slowly, his mouth working around the words like a spoonful of peanut butter.

“Was that the time you laughed so hard you had an asthma attack, and we gave you more weed to get you to stop coughing?”

  
Steve grins so hard he feels like his face might split in half.

“I was laughing because every time a light would turn on in one of the buildings across from us you’d stare at it and yell ‘HELLO?’ like they were signaling you.”

Bucky smiles, mostly in reaction to Steve’s mirth. “Was that your first time smoking weed?”

“Yeah. I liked it, but my lungs weren’t crazy about it in the morning, especially since we slept out on the fuckin’ fire escape ‘cus my Ma would’ve beat us into next Sunday if we came inside smelling that loud. So I didn’t smoke it much - especially if you weren’t around.”

Bucky’s smile widens. Steve’s eyes are drawn to his mouth. He licks his own lips subconsciously.

“Can we get some? Somewhere?” Bucky asks, a hint of his old ornery self coming out again that Steve just can’t say no to.

“If you buy it, punk. I have a reputation to uphold.”

Bucky shrugs, tosses a shadow of his former grin over his shoulder, and goes out to buy rolling paper. 


	2. tongue tied like we've never known

Bucky can feel all of his muscles moving simultaneously. Breathing is how mist rising from wheat fields in early morning feels.

His tongue just feels fuckin’ weird.

He asks Steve if he feels it, too. “Do you feel how weird my tongue feels? I mean - does your tongue feel like it doesn’t belong to you?”

Steve smiles and slings his arm around Bucky’s shoulders. He smells like the sour lemon drops they used to steal from corner drug stores, and his forearm rests in puzzle-piece perfection against Bucky’s neck. It could almost be an extension of his own body - quite honestly, Bucky wouldn’t have minded, as long as it was Steve’s arm.

After five hours of driving, they had arrived in Georgia and decided, after much bitching and moaning about their old age, to take a break. The rest stops in Georgia are bordered by golden pine forests and needle-padded walking trails. The allure of stretching their legs and a little delinquency is too much for them to pass up. So they smoked a bowl and set off deeper into the woods.

Steve looks like he could melt into the beams of light coming in through the boughs far above them. His hair sets off sparks against the surrounding dark wood. A Baroque painting comes to Bucky’s mind, all dramatic shadows and avoided eye contact, mixed with the subtle religious detail of the halo around his stupid head. Time is a multi-faceted entity that Bucky can’t seem to grasp with certainty. They’ve only been walking for ten minutes, but it could’ve been hours for Bucky. Everything is underwater but it’s good and smells fresh and heavy, a breath of ozone before a storm.

“-Natasha’s blintzes are just outrageous, Buck - I’ve never been much for slavic food but boy I could eat those for weeks and never get tired of ‘em. Of course, my favorite food is my Ma’s apple pie. I gotta teach you to bake, Buck, you’ve always been shit at it but I think now that you’re a little more focused you might be able to produce something not burnt to high heaven-“

Steve continues to talk, voice sounding more and more like the bells that used to ring for Sunday mass. Not the electronic kind that make your teeth clench but the real ones that clang off beat for several minutes before leaving the air in a euphoric afterglow.

Steve has stopped talking. Bucky realizes he’s just said all of this out loud. He smiles sheepishly. That’s something he’s re-learned how to do pretty well. Steve’s ears are red and Bucky strokes over them lightly with his metal hand and watches them turn almost purple.

“You’re just full of watercolor paint, aren’t ya?” Bucky asks. “Like the horse from ‘The Wizard of Oz’.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “Of all the damn stupid things to remember, you go for our first date.”

Bucky’s eyebrows raise in surprise, if a little belated. “How was it?”

“Terrible. I spilled popcorn every where I was so fuckin’ nervous - we’d already been roommates for a year and a half. Felt twenty one goin’ on twelve. My hands were sweating and I ended up using my inhaler during the scene with the trees; scared me half to death.”

Bucky feels a memory swimming to the surface, coated in a powdered, bittersweet nostalgia. He almost doesn’t ask, but he needs to know why Steve’s ears are red and why his gut is quite suddenly a turbulent ocean.

“That was our first kiss, right?”

Steve bites his lip and nods. His eyes are a heart monitor in his face, picking up every minute shift in his pulse and mood. Bucky sees everything. He may not understand it all, but he sees it. And that’s what’s important here, Bucky realizes. Not that he remembers everything right away, or even ever, but that he sees.

He sees Steve, he always has - even as a 90 pound, too-proud punk that couldn’t back down from a challenge if it killed him. Steve would probably outlive God having the last word; or the last punch.

Or he would, if he hadn’t been so thoroughly up-rooted recently.

Bucky knows Steve will never lose his resolve to protect the things he loves, but now that everything has turned upside down and inside out for the Star Spangled Man With a Plan - what exactly does Steve love?

They walk for another forty five minutes in the half gloaming light, soaking in sap and humidity. They return to the car and Bucky’s metal arm magnetizes to the door. Steve laughs so hard Bucky thinks he might have a 70-year-late asthma attack.

It’s still not great, and they’re dancing around each other like dead leaves in a gale-storm, but it’s a start.

Bucky kicks off his boots in the car and carelessly throws his legs back up on the dashboard. Another thing he’s relearned is how to move like butter on honey - silk and gravity clings to his bones, caress his body until he floats. He knows Steve watches his legs and his hips and his hands.

He knows Steve feels better when he moves like this, instead of how his body tells him to, how he was trained to - rust and bomb shelters in the swing of his arms and the heaviness of his tread.

He likes Steve watching. He likes being admired for who he is, instead of what he was made into.

He remembers feeling hot under Steve’s gaze, and now he knows why.

  
++

  
Steve’s always had a thing for southern accents.

He likes the soft drawl that rolls around in the mouth, a caramel candy that coats the tongue. He doesn’t have the best experience dealing with endearments, either. The sweet things their waitress calls him and Bucky have him getting “the honey-glows somethin’ awful”, according to the blonde that pours his coffee at the diner they’ve stopped in.

“She’s cute,” Bucky says, and Steve shakes his head as Hank Williams lilts from the tinny speakers in the fluorescent restaurant.

“The accent is better,” he explains. Bucky’s mouth forms a gentle “oh”, curling slightly in the same arc as the steam from his hot coffee.

“Do you love it when she calls you sweet daddy?” Bucky asks, his voice shifting into syrup, tone obviously teasing. Steve choses that exact moment to take a sip of his coffee and promptly spits it back out again at Bucky’s words. Bucky’s laughter echoes through the whole damn state. He claims it payback for his arm getting stuck on the car.

They take a pecan pie to go and Steve has to try hard to not scratch off all the NRA stickers from the trucks in the parking lot. Bucky slides his metal hand across a freshly done paint job for him instead, and it makes Steve’s heart beat with renewed affection.

They listen to Ray Charles and Brook Benton in the car - “It’s important to immerse yourself in the culture of the place you’re in, Buck,” - and Bucky softens his vowels like he did in the diner as he sings under his breath.

If it was anyone else, Steve wouldn’t have bothered to listen so closely. If it was anyone else, Steve wouldn’t have cared. But Bucky - he’s singing and his eyes are lavender-grey in the flashes of yellow from headlights they pass and Steve’s always loved his singing. If it was anyone else, Steve’s chest wouldn’t feel devoid of air, nor would his eyes be bordering on wet.

This time, there are no shortcuts, no where for Steve to run away to, no locks on the windows. He’s unbound from the world and undone to the point of a nervous breakdown.

And yet - he feels safe. He feels happy. He’s with Bucky.

They cross the Florida state line somewhere around 11 pm. Bucky checks his phone for the GPS that tells him they have two more hours to get to Tampa. Wisps of hair have escaped his bun and drape against his face - it reminds Steve of the Spanish moss that strangles the old oak trees lining the highway. Rain spits down hard on the windshield to the point Steve is concerned it might shatter the glass.

“I remember all of them, you know that?” Steve hears over the din of cascading water.

Bucky’s eyes have gone tight and wary, like he’s afraid if he says anything about what he’s gone through Steve will start foaming at the mouth.

“No, I didn’t… Do you want to talk about it?”

Bucky is silent, pulling at the loose hairs around his face, twisting them around his finger. Nervous habit that he never lost.

“It just seems weird that after all … that, you still think I’m the same person. “

“I never said that, Buck.”

Bucky looks at him - there’s an unfamiliar uncertainty there now, one that Steve could safely say he’d never seen on Bucky’s face before.

“Do you want me to be?”

Steve sighs and rubs absently at the short hairs near his neck. Bucky helped him trim his hair this morning. The razor had rattled ridiculously against Bucky’s metal hand, but luckily one of the things he’d picked up during “summer camp”, as Bucky called it, was fine motor skills in both hands. He was able to give Steve a clean fade, a little longer on top.

“I know it’s not gonna be the same as it was. I know that. I’m not the same, and I can’t expect it of you. But… I want to try to be… normal? I want to feel like I have something to hold on to, I guess. Everything else has already slipped through my fingers. I guess what I’m saying is - I want you to be yourself, in whatever version of you that manifests in. Having you around, even if it’s half or a quarter or two percent of who you used to be - that’s enough. ”

Steve clears his throat at the end. Bucky is quiet when he reaches over with his metal arm to rest his hand against Steve’s thigh. The weight is foreign, but still comforting.

“Can we eat that pie now?”

They pull over to the side of the road and Steve pull’s the pecan pie out of the backseat. Steve is perfectly content to eat with his fingers, reveling in the simple pleasure of feeding himself and licking the brown sugar topping off his fingers. Bucky warms up to the idea while he watches Steve's mouth, and licks the stickiness from his own thumb.

Saxophone fills the car with slowed time. The rain continues to fall. They both lose the need for words - for now.


End file.
